Grief: Finding Hope Again

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Author: Paul David Tripp

I’ll never forget those grief-stricken eyes—sad, hollow, distant. She watched helplessly as her husband’s life withered away. He was a good man in his early forties, the father of two children, and committed to Christ, family, and ministry. Her husband’s dying pushed her to the borders of her faith. What good, what love, what meaning could she find in the death of this young husband and father? How could God let this happen?

…A father sobbed as he told of the accident scene where he saw his daughter’s lifeless body lying twisted on the pavement. His voice shook with emotion over the shocking insanity of death. His wife had taken their three children to the community pool for an afternoon of fun. After their swim, they were crossing the road to get to their car. Suddenly, their three-year-old daughter dropped her mother’s hand and darted into the street. A speeding SUV struck and killed her. Their lives would never be the same.…I looked at my mother in her hospital bed; her body ravaged by age and disease. She had been so vibrant, so strong, so alive. Now, her frail body lay in a tangle of tubes. The hum of life-support machines drowned out her weak breaths. Helplessly we watched death take her, defying all the technology that tried to keep her alive. We held her lifeless hand and pushed the hair off her forehead. We kissed her cheek and straightened her sheet as if she were there. We simply didn’t know how else to act.We had so much unfinished business with her. But we would have no more conversations. No more phone calls. No more visits. No more anything. We were left with a warehouse of fond and painful memories and a collection of faded photographs.…The Bible isn’t arranged by topic. We can’t go to the section on grief and collect what we need for life’s darkest moments. Yet God’s great story of redemption has much to say about your story of grief. This booklet, I hope, will help you see how your story of loss fits in the larger story of God’s plan to fix everything that sin has so cruelly broken.